


A Night of Thaw

by masterofesoterica



Category: Blade Runner (Movies), Blade Runner 2049
Genre: Afterlife, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-09
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 03:08:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12644922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masterofesoterica/pseuds/masterofesoterica
Summary: A life, a death, and maybe something else.





	1. A Night of Thaw

_…I hope you’re satisfied with our product…_

 

A sudden snuffing out; a flicker and then nothing.

 

_…I love you…_

 

To the end, she was his. And he was hers, he realised, when Joi in blue looked down at him. Joe, she’d said, such a special boy. He was not old—still young enough for bedtime stories. In years, despite his memories. (The memories that were not his, never his.) Their names—such perfect symmetry. Joe, she’d said, Joi said, driving longing like a spike into his synthetic body.

 

He was—same as what she was—built for purpose. As much her _product_ as she was his. She felt the rain on her face, wet in her hair. Joi breathed and held her hands up to the sky, palms open as though in prayer. She showed him what he did not dare see.

 

Now he opened his palms. A different kind of coldness was seeping into him.

 

_...I love you…_

 

Taking the words he wanted so desperately to be able to say. Joi knew him, called him by a real boy’s name, told him he was special, so she could be there, solid, real. Joi leaned down from her great height and pointed her neon finger at him alone. _More human than humans._ That was the bond they shared—the thing they both understood as they looked into the sky.

 

_…you don’t have to say that…_

 

He said to her instead, wishing she was somehow less completely his. But she was his mirror in all things. More himself than himself.

 

There was not much to him, after all, just that burning, gaping thing. Joi knew. Some empty thing, hollowed out, a shell of four symbols. Four symbols rather than two. Four—and therefore doubly closer to the image of their creator.

 

_…oh…you don’t like real girls…_

 

He was not built for reality but he found it nonetheless. He was built to last. She said—and it was another command—die for a cause. Our cause.

 

He was glued back together as easily as a toy. A pat on the head and sent on his way. The hand-me-down passed from one sibling to another. The water had been black. Black as the womb. The all of them shared the blood of the covenant though they were all strangers to the womb.

 

She said—die for something. Die for the right cause. Another command he itched to follow. Kill him—kill the father, she said. Her eye glinted, cast a familiar shadow.

 

The same look in Madam’s eyes. The expectation of obedience. The great promise of a new age foreseen by a blind prophet.

 

Freysa saw the blood in him with her one eye—the left one. If thy right eye offend thee, then you must pluck it out. Kill the father. She saw the blood in him, hot and coarse. Corrosive. The mark of one lesser; the brand of a slave.

 

She was elevated by the miracle she had beheld. And the bundle of flesh and bone in her hands, once. That babe in which he saw himself, underneath those bare branches.

 

_…I hope you are satisfied with our product…_

 

He was built to last—to withstand shocks and cuts and bruises. But pain came nonetheless, as relentlessly as the waves pushed at the sea wall. A white cone of pain that pressed close around him.

 

Joe and Joi. They were born under the sky. They had no mother and no father but the rain and the snow.

 

He was built to last, just as Joi was made to withstand desire. She took his hand, and it was warm. And she pressed her fingers to his face, and he felt the spirals of her fingerprints and the edges of her nails.

 

_…a miracle…_

He imagined Joi’s hands warm again.

 

Though they were warm. They were warm as Mariette had smiled at him sly—and kind.

 

In the concave of his chest he felt something fluttering. Something like a heart stuttering, something like footsteps against metal staircases, something like the unfurling of a new green bud on a dead tree.

 

_…a miracle…_

He had felt a miracle at last.

 

Each snowflake, a pattern not repeated. He knew what was real. The snow landed on his open palms. Gradually, gradually, the snow ceased to melt.

 

 


	2. AND/OR

_Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky._

 

_And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate_

_Myself…_

 

 

When he opened his eyes he found himself lost in grey space. There was a strangeness in his arms and in his neck, and in his side where he expected an empty space. Instead, he found an expanse of unbroken flesh, as good as when he’d come out of the bag.

 

When he opened his eyes that first time, fresh into the world, was he not born?

 

Blinking a few more times, the fog cleared from his eyes.

 

Beneath him, the stairs were covered in a thick layer of snow. It felt softer than his bed, but warm and dry somehow. He could feel no damp and no cold.

 

The sky was grey. The Los Angeles skyline was a hazy smudge of darker grey against the grey canvas rendered by the snow storm. Even as he looked up, he could no longer see the slender letters in the sign of the Stelline building. He wondered, even now, whether Ana was reaching out her hand to her father. The true miracle child born, and not made.

 

He had loved Ana even in the strange moment he first met her—loved her, as the compass points North. Were replicants meant to know such things of the world? He loved her as now-extinct birds used to find their winter nesting places.

 

The snow was weightless as it fell against his skin, each snowflake lingering there and then disappearing. But he could not feel the cold of the snow. He felt warm in his flesh.

 

Each step he took was an effort like he has never known before. His feet sank into the snow—up to his knees. His fingers scrabbled at the hard ground beneath the strangely empty layer of whiteness.

 

He was walking through this part of the city that he has never been to. Stretched before him, long avenues, park squares full of synth-grass, and paved paths. There were no people here. He turned back. The Stelline building was still there, strangely out of place with its sharp angles.

 

The wind moaned. He thought perhaps that it was whispering his name—the name his mother would’ve given him—if only he had been born a boy.

 

The white fountain rose out of the thick snow. The sound it made was of tinkling bells and a child’s laughter. As water falls, it strikes the white basin and freezes—and shatters. The fragments hang suspended in the air for a few moments. Then they melt into the air.

 

“Come on! Come _on_! Slow poke, you can’t catch me!” It was a young girl’s voice, high and resonant.

 

A man’s laugh followed.

 

The two figures approached him as though from a parting in the heavy storm. The girl had long hair and she was running, spinning, skipping. In her hand, she held a small bow and an arrow with a blunted wooden tip. The man held a small black gun in his hand, loping slowly towards the girl.

 

With a sly smile, the man lifted up the gun and mimed a shot. And then the girl was falling head forward into the snow, tumbling over with a gasp.

 

“You got me!” She clutched her chest dramatically, gasping. But her eyes were crinkled with laughter, even as she knelt in the snow, the wooden toys abandoned by her side.

 

“I got you, little one!” The man stood for a moment over the girl. Then, in a single exhilarating motion, he lifted up his child and spun her around in a circle.

 

She gave a delighted yelp. “Keep turning!”

 

The fountain continued its strange flow—the water rising and freezing and shattering—a soft musical rhythm which encompassed the strange, white, snowy world he now found himself. The father and child continued to play, dancing around the fountain.

 

He walked towards the father and daughter, drawn as though by some sort of magnetism in his circuits. They did not notice him at first, and as he came closer and closer to the strange, white fountain, he became aware of his own body, its fragility and lack of purpose. Still he walked forward until he could see his reflection in the basin of the fountain.

 

It was not the face he expected. It was the face of a pale, long-faced boy with dark blonde hair a little longer than usual. His eyes were narrowed against the brightness of the snow-covered ground.

 

“Who are you there?” said the little girl, “I’ve never met someone else like me before!”

 

He turned to face her. The young Dr. Stelline was smiling at him, her pale green eyes shining. Beside her, Deckard raised a hand wryly, and gave a half-hearted smirk.

 

“Come on! Let’s play,” she said, and reached out her hand.

 

Officer KD6-3.7 walked towards her, his own hand outstretched. Each step was an enormous effort as he sank down to his knees in the snow. But he went on, the small distance between them seemingly endless.

 

He could see the soft pink flesh of her fingers, the wrinkles around her knuckles, and the smoothness of her palm. His own hand, held out in front of his face was of the same size and shape. But if he turned it over and saw the palm, there might be scars there.

 

Ana was smiling at him, her teeth little pearls of white behind the pale curve of her lips.

 

The moment their hands touched, Officer KD6-3.7 was thrown backwards.

 

He could see Deckard’s dark eyes, flickering, something unspoken in his craggy face. Officer KD6-3.7 was lying on the steps, his blood a dark red circle around him, his side gaping. The snow was cold and wet, seeping through his clothing to his flesh. The pain returned like a symphony, the opening notes low, rising in a crescendo. Somewhere in the distance, a tall white fountain played.

 

 


End file.
